Editorial: Our Mount Rushmore

The five best U.S. presidents

After the U-T Editorial Board detailed our selections for the worst presidents last month, we were urged to weigh in on those we considered the best. Here’s our list.

1. Abraham Lincoln, 1861-1865.

No president has been written about as much as the 16th president, with historians crafting literally thousands of books that attempt to shape and reshape his legacy. For us, the simple narrative is the most powerful: Lincoln fought the Civil War both to free the slaves and to preserve the Union, because he believed America was the only nation yet extant that “held out a great promise to all the people of the world for all time to come.”

The tidy stories about “Honest Abe” – America’s “secular deity,” in the phrase of Lincoln biographer Joshua Wolf Shenk – sometimes create the impression of Lincoln as a halo-wearing nobleman who was above politics. In fact, his presidency reflected remarkable shrewdness and careful calculation. As Doris Kearns Goodwin detailed in 2005’s “Team of Rivals,” Lincoln’s willingness to surround himself with bright, experienced people who challenged his assumptions and presumptions made him a much better commander-in-chief.

Given his tortured personal life and the opportunism and slipperiness he showed throughout his early years in politics, it is hard to fathom the astounding resolve and determination he began to display in 1861. Between his election in 1860 and his taking office, seven states seceded.

Your opinion

Who did readers vote for the top 5?

Best - Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865)

2nd - George Washington (1789-1797)

3rd - Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809)

4th - Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945)

5th - George Bush (1989-1993)

The survey began Thursday Aug. 23 at 1 p.m. These results are from Saturday Aug. 25 at 1 p.m., with 1,858 completed responses.

As he declared in his inaugural speech, Lincoln could not accept this assault on the United States of America. After four years of brutal fighting, the Union was victorious. Soon afterward, Lincoln was dead, the first president to be assassinated. His accomplishments were diminished by his incompetent successor, Andrew Johnson, who allowed defeated Southern states to impose the racial restrictions and injustices that led to nearly a century of Jim Crow segregation keeping down millions of African-Americans.

But Lincoln had preserved his beloved Union while freeing the slaves with his 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. A century later, Martin Luther King Jr. began his historic “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington with this tribute: “Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. ... It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity.”

King, of course, then went on to urge America to do a far fuller job of helping blacks overcoming the still-vast obstacles they faced 98 years after the Civil War’s end. And since then, thanks to King and to so many people of goodwill of all colors, we have made huge strides – building, at long last, on the awesome accomplishment of America’s greatest president.

2. George Washington, 1789-1797.

A courageous war hero and superb military leader, he was not remotely one of the leading intellectual forces in shaping the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But such was the respect for the Washington among his fellow Founding Fathers that they knew that he and he alone must be the nation’s first president. “We cannot, sir, do without you,” Thomas Jefferson told the Virginia planter.

Jefferson was right. On decision after decision, Washington set smart precedents for future presidents. He had the federal government assume the states’ debts from the War of Independence and put down a tax rebellion in Pennsylvania to establish that states were part of a unified nation, not a loose confederacy. Despite provocations, he kept the U.S. out of a war between ally France and enemy England. By avoiding entangling alliances, he allowed a weak nation to gather itself, and established America as independent from Europe’s quarrels. He refrained from using his power and prominence to bully the judicial and legislative branches of the government, an utterly crucial decision for our democracy. (In his first inaugural speech, for example, he made no broad policy proposals.)

In his book “The Genius of George Washington,” historian Edward S. Morgan used Washington’s own letters to show his mastery of military power extended to political power. Another historian, Peter Henriques, described him as a “realistic visionary” who studied the world with detachment and understood “that men and nations are driven by interests, and any form of government that failed to take into account the true character of human nature would be unsuccessful.”

This discernment and practicality helped Washington lead the colonies to victory over the British, then to oversee the early years of our democracy with commanding insight and skill. We have Founding Fathers. But was also have a Founding Father. It was George Washington, the lightly educated farmer’s son turned general turned president.

3. Ronald Reagan, 1981-1989

Few presidents have ever taken office in more troubled times than California’s 33rd governor when he assumed the presidency. Roaring inflation was like a cancer eating away at families’ earning power. Joblessness was high. The Soviet Union was at the apex of its power and arguably was winning the Cold War. A decade’s worth of bad news on Vietnam, Watergate, gas prices, the Iranian hostage crisis and the economy had left millions of Americans sullen and depressed.

All of that changed dramatically during Reagan’s eight years in the White House, beginning with the day he took office and the American hostages in Tehran were released. Working with Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, his administration reversed the policies fueling inflation. Teaming in often-remarkable fashion with bipartisan congressional majorities, Reagan brought down high marginal tax rates and won enactment of a sweeping tax reform and simplification measure, both crucial to the 1980s economic boom.

U.S. fortunes abroad were changing, too. Overruling his senior aides, in 1987, Reagan went to Berlin and, in one of the most electrifying moments in our history, declared, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” It was maligned at the time, and some maintain the subsequent Soviet ratcheting down of the Cold War, the 1989 tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet dissolution in 1991 were primarily due to reformer Mikhail Gorbachev’s emergence as Soviet private minister.

But not Eduard Shevardnadze, Gorbachev’s foreign minister, who said Reagan’s direct challenges to the Soviet Union – such as his 1982 speech in which he said Soviet communism would be left on “the ash heap of history” – rattled and demoralized Moscow. Shevardnadze concluded Reagan understood the Soviet Union’s “central weakness”: Its economy could not compete with America’s, and Moscow could not continue to spend two-thirds of its budget on the military to keep pace with the Pentagon. The revived U.S. economy and Reagan’s determination to establish military superiority gave Gorbachev no choice but to reform, Shevardnadze said.

Reagan did all this while presiding over the last largely civil era in U.S. politics and while the public broadly regained its once-shaky confidence that America remained “a shining city on a hill,” in his famous phrase. He looms like a giant over our modern history.

4. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1933-1945

When the former New York governor took power in 1933, the U.S. economy was in a shambles and the notion of American exceptionalism was held in contempt. Twelve years later, when he died in World War II’s final months, America bestrode the world like a colossus. Besides establishing Social Security, his domestic record was mixed; it took war to revive the economy. But in meeting the challenge of fighting Germany, Japan and Italy, FDR unleashed the enormous productive capacity of America to build ships, tanks and planes, securing the greatest military triumph in history in less than four years, and setting the stage for our emerging economic might to dominate the postwar world. The events of the war years established the 20th century as the American Century. It’s also why the respected British magazine The Economist called FDR “the man who saved his country, and the world.”

5. (tie) George H.W. Bush, 1989-1993, and George W. Bush, 2001-2009

A sputtering economy – and the most powerful third-party candidacy in generations – doomed the elder Bush’s re-election bid. But he is one of the most underrated presidents of modern times. His masterful oversight of the first Iraq War, including his patient building of an immense international coalition against Saddam Hussein, has few precedents. His determined and skilled efforts to address and wind down the huge savings and loan crisis look better than ever in retrospect. And in managing U.S. foreign policy in a chaotic time in which the Soviet Union dissolved and the erratic Boris Yeltsin took power in Russia, the elder Bush and Secretary of State James Baker set a standard for shrewd stewardship.

His son was far more controversial; for many, the bitterness over the way the 2000 election was resolved will never go away. But the resolve the younger Bush showed in his response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks helped unite America for a time, and it led to policy changes that have kept America safe from subsequent attacks. His push to bring democracy to Iraq helped inspire the Arab Spring. His determination to use federal power to force states to improve struggling schools, especially in poor minority neighborhoods, brought new attention and resources to the problems facing public education. And it took time, but finally the younger Bush’s heroic role in taking on the humanitarian crisis of AIDS in Africa is being fully acknowledged. Singer/activist Bono said the expansion of U.S. help during his administration saved “millions and millions of lives ... without the leadership of President Bush, those numbers would not be there.”